Yolandi E C Guerrero

Yolandi E C Guerrero 

Jan 24, 2017 

“if you are silent about your pain

they will kill you and say that 

you enjoyed it” 

Zora Neale Hurston 

I start off with Zora Neale Hurston quote, as a way of thinking about this anthology as a site of resilience, as a site of weaved voices, as a site of the different dimensions in which black protest and black live manifest. One of the main ways in which the stories of this book expand beyond their specific reference is in the way it gathers past and present expressions of anti-blackness within the U.S context. This anthology, does not claim to be an “inclusive diasporic collection,” by not claiming a more global gathering of “living black poets” or “living black people across contents” it has the space and time to expand on the way we might understand black suffering, black vulnerability, the black joy of surviving. This book is able to capture a transhistorical attack on the black body, by allowing poets to share their testimonies. This essential of any “good” anthology: to gather different voices in order to make a larger point about a historical moment. 

I am thinking about the Poetics of Insanity as a way to try and link the Black Arts Movement for example with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. Within this book, there references to the Black Arts Movement and to Ginsberg and the poets of his time. Ginsberg’s starts his howl with: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. I would like to identify the idea of madness as the poetics of insanity which has been well preserved in the cannon for white poets of both genders (Virgina Wolf wasn’t crazy…she was a “genius,” THE feminist of her time.” Ginsberg’s work usually is read and perhaps was written with this romanticized idea that he spoke truths that included a larger American public, and that larger American public included black folk, which it did not.

In both “Howl and his piece titled“America” one can track how his whiteness grants him the privilege of using the poetics of insanity to call out the wrong, he sees in this world, especially within the U.S context. This is not to dismiss his own life struggles, or that he did use drugs as a part of his poetic process. So that when he writes, “America I've given you all and now I'm nothing. /America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956. /I smoke marijuana every chance I get.” We may know his work is as autobiographical as a way to critique the empire we live under. In other words, what is successful about Ginsberg work, is that when a white poet goes insane it speaks truth to the destructive and violent nature of governments, in this case, a capitalist one. If white men feel disillusion with this government, one that was built for only their survival, then what does that say for the rest of the population whose life were not and not considered?

Ginsberg work, and the work he did in “Howl” become historically important because poetry can be used as this archival information that can provide the information we need for the future. A lot of his work tried to reflect the problems that people in the U.S were facing and also how the survival of the U.S as a super power was destructive for the whole world. In this part of “America,” he writes: “I can't stand my own mind. America when will we end the human war? Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb. I don't feel good don't bother me. I won't write my poem till I'm in my right mind.” This is in part what made me wonder about the poetics of insanity. Black and brown poets, poets whose subjectivities push them to the margins and eternally out of the cannon have been dealing and are also, as Ginsberg's writes, “sick of your insane demands” referring to the U.S’s imperialistic and dehumanizing ways.

So what is the difference? When a white poet decides to not write because they cannot stand the state of a global human condition, when a white poet is able to critique our governments, called themselves communist, claim insanity as a way of “sanity,” when a white poet does this they are taking serious, they become, if not immediately, eventually, a part of the great American poets, they are remembered.

I am thinking about all of this as I moved through my reflections of this book we are discussing because I think this book exist within a duality. A duality that was felt during the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Movement/Black Arts Movement, which is that, when black folk in the U.S articulate or fight for their humanity they have tp do this within the politics of nationalism and patriotism. In other words, part of what this book is doing is inserting black narrative, black lived complexities into the cannon, this book is nominating in one hand, that the black poet is without a thought an American poet. And, the other hand, this book has its own sovereignty, it is free, it has dominion over itself, it collected the voices it wanted to, now anyone who wants to engage it has to believe in black live, black art, black joy. Because this book is for the living poets, who remember the ones who have crossed over. 

“We want a black poem. And a 

Black World.

Let the world be a Black Poem

And Let All Black People Speak This Poem

Silently

or LOUD”